


Rebels And Heretics

by Britpacker



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s01e07 A Rebellious Woman, F/M, Missing/Expanded Scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 02:50:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1329109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Milady never realised her patron was so conventional; he never guessed his heretical assassin could be such a good nurse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebels And Heretics

**Author's Note:**

> The scenes in the Cardinal's sickroom were glorious, but too short for my taste. Being me, I've had to play around with expanding them!

Cold. 

Water.

Slowly, painfully the words formed within his foggy brain. Restless, confused, Cardinal Richelieu turned his heavy head on the pillows, letting a few cleansing droplets slip against his dry and swollen tongue. Alive. He was – somehow – alive.

Her beautiful, familiar face swam hazily before his eyes and for a moment his chest tightened, his throat constricting as if the poison were closing it once more. “Was it you?”

Later, perhaps, he would curse the fleeting vulnerability but she was unperturbed and as clarity crept back he could accept the wild fear was unfounded. Had Milady de Winter chosen to assassinate her patron in full view of a crowded ecclesiastical court, she would have done it properly. The potion would have been instantly fatal. 

His agents were, after all, trained never to take reckless risks.

Nor, he mused as he watched her move around his room, deft with fresh water and a cool cloth for his spinning head, did he employ nurses. “It may attract unwelcome comment, Milady, that a woman should be attending me alone in a monastic sick room,” he observed, vaguely displeased with the rustiness of the words. 

The insufferable creature merely shrugged. “I’d sooner not trust your life to the King’s Musketeers, and the physicians are all fools,” she said dismissively. “No, don’t try to sit up. Even those imbeciles can tell you’re very weak, despite the King’s prayers. He’s been on his knees in the church ever since he was thrown wailing out of your chamber, as if that'll make a difference.”

“No prayer goes unheard by God, Milady.”

Her soft snort echoed like a gunshot in the quiet room. “If it cheers you to know it, there’s some benefit perhaps,” she allowed carelessly. “And should you defy those of the doctors who declared you lost you’ll find His Majesty more in thrall to you than ever. I doubt you were able to notice how desperate he was when you were carried in here.”

“I _was_ somewhat preoccupied at the time,” he conceded ruefully, all his concentration required to lift his hand from the bed. His companion swept across from the window, swatting the unsteady limb away and guiding the glass he had been aiming for to his mouth herself.

“Sip carefully,” she instructed sternly. “I’d not care to be sent to the stake accused of choking you to death, and in the King’s current state of panic it’s not unlikely! He expects to be summoned the instant you rouse up, but perhaps....”

“Perhaps it would be best to wait until I’m stronger.” The prospect of a hysterical Louis did not appeal at the best of moments and as he tried to raise his head, to follow her silent movements around his room, Richelieu was forced to admit that this was not among them. His stomach churned violently and though he bit hard into his bottom lip he couldn’t quite repress a soft moan.

“Oh, you’re not ready to face your Creator yet.” Her shadow blocked the pale stream of light from the window opposite, her glacially lovely face going hazy for a moment as she stooped to brush her lips, full and warm, across his own. She lingered for a moment despite his lack of reaction, then drew back with a brisk nod. “There’s no smell of it on your breath at least,” she added, quirking a finely marked eyebrow at his slight start. “You didn’t _really_ believe it was a witch’s curse, I presume?”

“I believe I know poison when I nearly die of it,” he answered drily. “But the Comtesse must confess to everything, and willingly.”

“Why does her death matter?”

“Her life or death is irrelevant, but with the treasury almost bankrupt her fortune is not. No matter what happens to me, you _must_ obtain it. By doing that, not wasting your time mopping my fevered brow, will you best serve me, do I make myself clear?”

He might be deathly pale, his voice still rusty and uncertain, but the words rang with all the authority of the Cardinal Richelieu she knew and behind her cold façade Milady de Winter’s heart soared to hear it. For all the years of obediently serving him – even the times she had offered her body, ready and willing to grant him that release from his duties officially prohibited to a man of his position – she had felt no bond; no emotion beyond crude, naked desire. Yet faced with the real prospect of his death, she had.

Fear. Panic. Desolation. And unlike the other person gripped by those emotions she had been forced to hold them within, keep her distance while the Musketeers of all the unlikely souls fought to save his life. 

Unlike Louis she could not wail, and it was many years since she had forgotten how to pray. She could only sit in the quiet cloister and wait, enclosed by the coldness that always surrounded her heart, feeling it spread to engulf her entire being. If he were to die...

She turned away to the window, afraid he might read the remembered terror in her eyes; even half-dead he was the shrewdest man in France, those crystalline eyes dulled with pain and poison still quite sharp enough to pierce the strongest soul. He would not die. He could not.

“Leave the Comtesse to me while you rest,” she said, pleased by the crisp assurance of the words. “I’ll have her confessing everything, up to and including the attempt against your life.”

He waved it away as if it were immaterial. “If she confesses to sorcery the people will take that as read,” he growled, stretching for the inlaid box at his bedside. Curious she opened it, recoiling in disgust from the grimy chunk of bone within. His quiet, apparently serious, intention to pray to the mouldy remains still rang in her ears as she slipped from the room.

*

Ninon submitted more easily than she had expected and when she handed the abject scrap of paper to him within an hour Milady suspected her success did more for his recovery than Saint Anthony ever could. “There’s no specific reference to you,” she said casually.

“No matter.” Whether thanks to the saint’s intercession or his own iron constitution he sounded stronger, his hand steadier as he held the confession to the light. But for his unnerving descent into pious trepidation, she would have said he was recovering well. “The King will have his navy, and I’ll have another sin in need of atonement at a later date.”

“When your work’s done perhaps you can retire here.” He never would, she knew, but there was always the chance the awful image of a France without his guiding hand might shake her patron from his unwelcome maundering. “Live out your days in prayer, good works and contemplation, if you think it’ll do you any good.”

“Take care no other priest hears such blasphemy from you.” His turn to be amused, the faintest of smiles flickering across his bloodless lips. “Not everyone is as tolerant of a useful heretic as I.”

“As Father Sestini seems determined to prove.” Contempt coloured her words. The Cardinal arched a brow but pointedly did not disagree.

“Luca always was _extreme_ in his devotions,” he acknowledged, drifting a hand over the Papal reliquary once more. “Oh, I’m no more a Jesuit than I am a heretic, but still.... do you really think this world Hell, Milady? And there’s nothing better to come?”

“I believe in what I see; nothing more or less.” Impulse possessed her, a mad, desperate impulse to remind herself this mortal existence wasn’t all suffering. Gently she grasped his hands, restraining any attempt he might make to prevent as her head dipped, her mouth puckered and she claimed his lips in a slow, sensuous kiss.

This time he did respond, his tongue dancing against her lower lip, even flicking briefly against the roof of her mouth. Deep inside she felt her muscles begin to liquefy, her whole body responding to his skilful, subtle teasing. A sigh slipped from her throat into his.

Then he turned his head, closing his eyes. “Don’t stop!”

She meant it as a command. Somehow it emerged as a plea.

“Doesn’t it make you feel better?”

She would have been wiser, she realised, to hold her tongue. The question sounded pitiful; petulant. Richelieu popped open one clear grey eye.

“Half the King’s physicians still think I’m doomed, if you recall,” he said, just the faintest trace of mockery giving the lie to those idiots’ opinions. “I’d rather not try my own strength too far.”

“And I’d not care to be accused of killing Your Eminence.” She used his title so seldom it always made him start; a small point of revenge against him when his brush with death had shaken her so badly, she decided. “The King’s of a mind to have anyone who harms you torn apart by horses and fed to his hunting dogs.”

“This descent into the mediaeval is obviously contagious.” He shifted onto his back once more, facing her with a rueful half-smile that vanished at her grim expression. “And you’re too useful for me to send to the stake, if that’s your fear.”

“Is our... _connection_ one of those sins you’ve still to account for?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” He steeled himself for the small effort of dragging himself up against his pillows, mildly surprised to find it easier, neither his churning stomach or his dizzy head objecting too violently to the movement. “I have more to account for than simple fornication; the condemnation of an innocent woman to a barbaric death, for instance. I dare say a few illiterate peasants share Rome’s obsessive terror of witches and demons but no intelligent man can accept that superstitious nonsense any more!”

“Yet you accept the power of those filthy old bones.”

“My faith may be primitive by your lights, Milady, but tell me you don’t envy me its solace!”

“Which of us fears Hell again?”

“And which of us has the hope of life everlasting once our time in Purgatory’s done?”

She shrugged. “Purgatory’s real enough, we walk through it every day! It’s why the wise grasp what small moments of pleasure they can.”

He sighed, turning the confession over in his hands again. “They’re building the pyre?”

“As you instructed.” She took the paper from him, leaving his hands free to caress the Pope's gift once more. “But if your conscience revolts against burning that innocent fool – why do it? You of all men make good use of intelligent, educated women. Why destroy Ninon?”

“Were she as poor as those insignificant girls whose heads she fills with nonsense I could dismiss her as a madwoman, but she holds one of the greatest private fortunes in France. The treasury stands empty and war with Spain, whether the Queen likes it or not, is coming.”

“So she must die for the benefit of the state. Sounds reasonable enough to me.”

“But _I_ must condemn her. Oh, she’s a dangerous nuisance with her exalted ideals. Would that silly girl Therese have been crushed beneath the King’s carriage without her encouragement? I doubt she feels any guilt for it but there’s a death that never would have happened without her meddling! Encouraging the lower orders to _think_ threatens the very fabric of the state itself. Even the King sees that.”

“The Queen quite likes the idea.”

“Her brother the King of Spain would not.”

She smirked. “And you’re in agreement with Spain. Your Holy Father would be proud of you.”

Even in his weakened state her teasing raised a rueful chuckle. “I will do what must be done with Ninon, but my conscience is not easy. Heresy may be real enough, but witchcraft? Surely we’ve gone beyond believing in that!”

“You’ll feel better about it once we’re back in Paris and you have the plans for the first great warship on your desk,” she diagnosed cheerfully. “She was a nuisance with ideas and the King’s not fond of opinionated women however pretty they are, he’ll forget her soon enough. Perhaps you can call one of those new ships the _Ninon_?”

“And perhaps you might ponder the dangers of heretical thought.” If she was surprised by the depth of his faith, Richelieu mused, he was no less shaken by this insight into her murky soul. That this woman would kill without compunction he had always known; it was a certainty he had used many times, including, indirectly, today. But that she did so without a care for the consequences in the life to come... he would watch Milady de Winter with even greater care in the future.

“You’re not the man to burn a pauper, and I’ve not the wealth to build a navy.” She leaned over the bed and kissed him, chaste and gentle on the lips, maintaining the light pressure until she felt his soften into the barest hint of a smile. “Besides, some clever women are useful to intelligent men – admit it!”

“Only a fool would deny it.” He caught her wrist, his grip strong and sure. “You have done well, _Madame de la Chapelle_ , but be careful. Athos, whatever his grudge against you, is a dangerous man. I will not always be here to protect you.”

“I can protect myself, but you’re going nowhere yet.” Voices echoed weirdly in the passageway and she stepped back, accepting his dismissal with a nod. “I’ll leave you to break the shocking news to the King. If you’re very lucky, he’ll have his doctors in attendance. You’re past needing their services I think, so don’t fret for your immortal soul too much. We wouldn’t want anything to delay your recovery.”

He might not hear it, his quicksilver mind already turning to the next business but Milady knew her voice wavered on the last few words. The prospect of a France without him had been, for a little while, all too real.

It was one that even she, the most hardened sinner, would find herself praying never to face again tonight.


End file.
